With its new SLA, Splunk assures its Splunk Cloud customers that their machine data analytics will be available 100 percent of the time

Operational intelligence specialist Splunk says its customers need to know that that the data platforms they depend on to monitor their environments are completely reliable, so it's putting its money where its mouth is. Today, the company unveiled a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA) for Splunk Cloud.

"This is the industry's first 100% uptime SLA for machine data," adds Praveen Rangnath, director of product marketing for Splunk Cloud. "It provides assurance to all of our customers that their operational analytics will be available to them whenever they need it."

In addition to the new SLA, Splunk is slashing the pricing by 33% on the cloud version of its platform. Rangnath says the reduction is the result of operational efficiencies Splunk gained in the first nine months of running the cloud service.

"We're committed to always increasing the value for our customers," he says. "We're a customer-first company. We've gained a lot of operational efficiency running this service in the past nine months and we're happy to share those with our customers."

Splunk also unveiled new service plans for Splunk Cloud. First, Splunk is offering the new Splunk Online Sandbox, which lets customers get started with Splunk Cloud for free for 15 days, using their own data -- if they prefer -- data preloaded by Splunk. After 15 days, they can start the service with a plan that allows them to index 5GB per day for $675 a month. Companies that need more can scale up to indexing as much as 5TB of data per day with up to 10x data bursting.

"MindTouch tested several machine data analytics services on the market and none except Splunk Cloud could handle the rigors of serious enterprise demands," says Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch, provider of a customer self-service support solution. "Our products are mission-critical to our customers, and the 100% uptime delivered by Splunk Cloud helps us meet our customers' expectations to be online all the time. Splunk Cloud has helped us to deliver 24/7 reliability."

MindTouch relies on Splunk Cloud to collect and analyze its machine data. It can then use the platform to monitor its cloud-based software in real-time and deliver business analytics to its customers.